2013 Pumpkin Decorating

With tomorrow being Halloween, I wanted to share with you the Arnold family pumpkins this year! I moved to Mississippi in October 2010 and one of the first things Mike and I did was carve a pumpkin(well he did more of the carving), so we have made it a point to try to do this every year! This year however, I wanted to try something a little different. I had been seeing painted pumpkins all over Pinterest and other blogs so I was thinking why not give something new a try this year! We purchased these pumpkins on our little outing last week that I wrote about here. I decided that I wanted to utilize my Silhouette Cameo that my MIL gifted me after the wedding! We wanted to each have a pumpkin for our favorite team and then one that was more unifying to the two of us. I was bad about taking pics as we went along so I will explain it in easy steps:

Before you begin, cover your surface with newspaper or some kind of barrier between your table/floor/ground. We painted at the kitchen table so we covered it with newspaper. We used acrylic craft paint sold at any store that has a hobby section.

Paint each pumpkin with a base coat. Choose a color that you want your shape to be once you peel off your stencil(The MsState Pumpkin was pre-painted white). It may take several coats especially if you're using a light color. Let dry one our between coats. Dry completely overnight

Cut out stencil using vinyl and stick to pumpkin. Being careful and mindful of the paint

Paint over the stencil and the entire pumpkin covering the entire under coat of paint(may take more than one coat) and let dry overnight.

Peel away vinyl and reveal under color! At this point you can decide if you would like to add some dimension to your design(like above with the SC pumpkin, I traced around the edge with black to make it pop more). Finally, admire your beautiful pumpkin!

I will say that we did not paint The Arnold's pumpkin. That is in fact just a vinyl sticker I cut and then adhered to the pumpkin. I love the simplicity and ease of that one!

We had a lot of fun decorating the pumpkins this year! Our dog, named Pumpkin, even got in on the action...

This is about 30 tries into it ha!

She's a Ham!!

Pumpkin doing her Meerkat impression for a treat!

And you may ask how we got Pumpkin to pose and there is a good explanation for that it requires tons of patience and lots of treats! Look below I caught her as mid trick(roll over) to get said treats, the entire time I just wanted her to sit still.

Pumpkin got her name for my love of fall and I wanted a constant reminder of my favorite time of year!